Wax Figure of Dr. Kane

Dr. Elisha Kent Kane, the intrepid American Arctic explorer, enjoyed tremendous fame in his day; he was celebrated in moving panoramas, depicted in medallions, and his accounts of his expeditions were runaway best-sellers. This wax relief is one of the more unusual -- and seldom-seen -- portraits of Dr. Kane; preserved in the archives of the United States Naval Academy, it resembles and may have been based on the popular CDV image by Matthew Brady (although if so, it's reversed). It's possible that it was made for use in a medallion or plaque (it's just 8 3/4 by 6 3/4 inches in size).

On his death in 1857 in Havana, Cuba -- where he had gone in a futile attempt to recover his health -- his remains were returned by steam-ship, and his  funeral train journey was the longest in American history to date (exceeded only by Lincoln's in 1865). His body was returned to Philadelphia and given an elaborate processional funeral, and he was laid to rest in the family fault at Laurel Hill Cemetery.

Erebus Bay Sites

With the news that this year's Parks Canada archaeological work will include both water and land searches, and that the land search will be concentrated around Erebus Bay, I thought I'd share this page from the 1995 report on NgLj-2, the site from which numerous skeletal remains and hundreds of physical artifacts were removed for study. Personally, I feel this area is already fairly-well scoured; last year's highlight -- a toothbrush -- may have shed some light on 19th-century dental hygiene, but not much on the fate of Franklin's men. A far more promising site would be the Todd Islets, where we know that the very last members of one group of Franklin survivors stopped and went no further/

Still, I understand the logistics of such a search -- having the support of research vessels and so forth in accessing remote sites is certainly important! -- so I have a few suggestions.  First off, how about NgLj-3? Two skulls, a knee-brace, and a human femur visible on the surface indicate graves which, as the report notes, may well be of Franklin's men.  The skulls were missing much of their facial portions, so positive identification of them as Caucasoid wasn't possible -- but today, using other techniques it may be possible to say more. That these bodies were at least given something of a burial suggests that they may have died before the final extremities, and the graves may contain other useful materials laid to rest with the men.

NgLj-4 might also be worth a look -- two pieces of copper found there are promising indicators of the presence of men, and perhaps ships, nearby.

I wish the Parks Canada archaeologists all the best -- we all hope they will find things of significance! --  and the land, like the water, may yet have some secrets to disclose.

Repost: The Engines of "Erebus" and Terror"

As is well-known, HMSS "Erebus" and "Terror" were both outfitted with ex-railway engines connected to screw propellors. And yet behind that general fact lies a host of detail, including slight variations between the two engines which would, without doubt, enable any searchers to distinguish the wreck of one ship from the other.

With deepest thanks to the fruits of a long-ago correspondence with British railway expert Michael R. Bailey, I thought I'd set out the basic facts, should anyone -- Parks Canada or others -- actually have the chance to recover either engine. As it happens, both were of the "Planet" type originally developed by Robert Stephenson & Co. As Michael describes it, "HMS 'Terror' had a four-coupled (0-4-0) version (strictly a 'Samson' type) built by Robert Stephenson & Co., which was used on the London & Birmingham Railway as a contractor's engine from about 1835 until sold to the Royal Navy in 1845." HMS "Erebus," on the other hand, was fitted with a 2-2-0 "Planet" (see illustration above), but not one built by Stephenson; it was rather a copy produced by the firm of Marshalls of Wednesbury for the London & Greenwich Railway in 1836. Both engines had seen about a decade of service, and were in a sense being "retired" in order to reduce older rolling stock. While they were of closely similar types, the array of the axles, as well as (Michael's note) "the variation in the height of the axleboxes" would enable them to be readily distinguished.

But what sort of shape would these engines be in after more than 160 years? Michael, whose experience is founded upon his work with "Operation Iron Horse," which involved recovering engines from an 1857 shipwreck off the coast of the Hebrides, is confident:

"The components on the 'Terror' and 'Erebus' should all be in good condition in the absence of oxygen. Wrought iron lasts well, unlike steel. The non-ferrous components should be largely unaffected. Their timber outer frames were clad on both sides by wrought iron plates. The plates should still be ok, but the timber may have gone. The condition of the ships' and locomotives will, of course, be quite dependent upon the prevailing sea conditions...... You will know well I'm sure, that iron-work etc. attracts marine life which attaches itself and builds up over the years and can distort the appearance. The main difficulty with the 'Iron Horse' expedition has been that all components have been 'buried' in a large lump of concretion (concreted crustations) and would be quite un-recognisable toa sonar scanner. The divers have had to chip away the concretion with pick to release each component, which is why it has all taken so long. However, it is likely that the crustations have been present because Scotland is on t he receiving end of the 'Gulf-stream' and is thus 'warm-water', and hence very different from King William Island."

So far, the engines have eluded all attempts at finding them. David Woodman spent a great deal of time and energy hauling a magnetometer over the seasonal ice in areas where Inuit testimony indicated one of the ships had been anchored, in hopes that either engine would produce a notable magnetic "signature" -- but all of the the targets he identified turned out to be large rocks and other natural phenomena. I don't know whether Parks Canada has or will employ similar techniques this season, but I do hope that, if they do find something, they're able to call upon the expertise of someone like Michael Bailey.

NB: Since this post, more detailed and accurate information has been developed by Peter Carney, and is given in some detail at the Building Terror blog.

Comfort Cove

The writer of the so-called "Peglar Papers" -- a cache of personal documents and letters found with the remains of one of the ships' stewards -- spoke of "the grave at Comfort Cove" (well, actually, as he preferred to write backwards, he spoke of "eht evarg ta Trofmoc Evoc"). A person of great importance was buried there, possibly Franklin or Crozier or one of the other officers. The name was borrowed, with what seems to us some irony, from the "Comfort Cove"on Ascension Island, which featured a graveyard adjacent to an isolated quarantine camp -- a site since re-dubbed more accurately as "Comfortless Cove." You can see images of it online, and they suggest not so much a place of refuge as one of (final) rest.

But where could this place be? No maps survive among the scraps of paper remaining to us, so it's impossible to know what names Franklin's men assigned to various land or water features. Still, if Franklin himself was buried there, then it must have been established by 11 June 1847. It must have been close enough to the ships that several parties -- those who were to dig the grave, and those who were to preside at and attend the funeral ceremony -- could reach the site. With "Erebus" and "Terror" still some distance NW of King William, this suggests a site nearer to Cape Felix than to Victory Point. I've been discussing this puzzle with Glenn M. Stein and others, and it seems to me one of those things that might best be solved by more heads than two. So let's have at it -- you can get a variety of free maps and satellite images from GeoGratis or (better yet) zoom in on Rupert Thomas Gould's invaluable Franklin search map of KWI from 1927; you can also look at the maps and reports prepared by David C. Woodman on his many search expeditions. What says the wisdom of the crowds?

Weird and Tragic Grave

As some have pointed out, there is of course one other unquestionably authentic photograph of Charles Francis Hall -- the one taken at his exhumation by my late friend Chauncey Loomis. I suppose it's possible that the information in this image could be used to help sort out the photos -- but in any case, what's striking here is how much less well-preserved Hall's body appears to be than those of John Torrington and his companions -- why? A map of the average annual precipitation in Greenland offers one hint: "Thank God Harbor" turns out to be one of the driest places in Greenland. What I think we see with Hall's body here is that it was essentially mummified -- the water in the coffin is what was left over from hot water used to thaw the ice. In all probability, this and the colder temperatures mean that Hall's remains were better preserved than those of Torrington -- if you look at Torrington's autopsy report, you'll see that although he looked lively on the outside, most of his internal tissues had more or less dissolved due to cell autolysis.

But this remains a haunting image, and one not available outside of a first edition of Loomis's book (and then only in black-and-white). If you look closely, you can see that something of his beard remains. It's also surprising that he was buried in an American flag -- this would definitely not be the right naval or military protocol, but then again "Captain" Hall and his crew were none of them members of any organized navy.

The other question that invariably comes up with Hall's grave is whether he was poisoned, and by whom. I believe that a very strong circumstantial case exists that he was deliberately poisoned with large doses of arsenic, probably by the ship's surgeon Dr. Emil Bessels. Loomis removed tissue samples from Hall's body, and they tested positive for arsenic, but Chauncey was always reluctant to state the case too strongly. Bessels, one of the more notorious scoundrels in the annals of Arctic exploration, had many bad qualities even if one presumes him innocent of murder -- among other things, he seems to have stolen the ships' log and Hall's own diary; neither were accounted for at the time of the inquest into the death of Hall, and yet some small sections of them were published, in German, after Bessels's return to Germany (he was evicted from his office at the Smithsonian to make way for a toilet -- a definite improvement!). Perhaps someday these documents will re-surface, and we'll know more; until then, Loomis's Weird and Tragic Shores remains the best account we have, and one of the finest books ever written about Arctic exploration. 

Second photo of Charles Francis Hall?

Among his other peculiar qualities, the Arctic explorer Charles Francis Hall has always been "monophotographic"-- that is, a man of whom only one photograph exists. This photograph was the basis for all the engraved portraits of Hall in the books and newspapers of the day, one of which is reproduced as the right-hand image above. But who is the man in the image on the left? The resemblance is striking, although his eyes seem to protrude a bit more, his beard is a tad shorter, and his nose somewhat more elongated. Still the resemblance is close enough that the Library of Congress has suggested that the Daguerreotype of which this photo is a crop may possibly be Charles Francis Hall.

If it is Hall, then perhaps there's some dimension of his life we know little about -- as the man in the Dag is wearing quite a theatrical costume, prompting the archival description "Unidentified man, three-quarter length portrait, three-quarters to the right, seated, with arm over back of chair, hand to cheek, with full beard, wearing jacket with elaborate trimming." Perhaps he joined in some amateur theatricals while in New York lobbying for backing for his expeditions? Or might this be from back in Cincinnati? The Daguerreotypes process had long faded from popularity by the 1860's when Hall rose to fame; it would be unusual to see it used for a formal portrait at or after that time. The image is attributed to Matthew Brady, but by the time of Hall's emergence on the national stage, Brady had switched to using Ambrotypes, as with this one of Dr. Elisha Kent Kane. More research is clearly required before we can say for sure, but I'm a bit doubtful.

The "Other" Franklin Record

The original Franklin record left near "Victory Point" on King William Island in 1848 is quite well-known, and has been discussed at length here and elsewhere. Far less common is any mention at all of the other official Admiralty form, very similar in every respect (save the fateful addendum in the margins) to its brother. Both records were filled out by James Fitzjames aboard HMS Erebus, and both repeated the same mistakes (the longitude given for Beechey Island is too far to the east by several miles, and the year of the ships' wintering there is misstated as 1846-47 rather than 1845-46). The other record was recovered at what became known as "Gore Point," the tip of the peninsula that forms the western side of Collinson Inlet. The location is consistent with the idea of Gore and Des Voeux having commanded a party sent out to survey the western coast of King William Island, with the presumed goal of reaching Simpson's cairn on the shores of Washington Bay; such a party would have skirted the coast, taking advantage of the still land-fast new ice for smooth travel. On the Gore Point record, the only significant difference is that the phrase "All Well" was not underlined.

So, at first glance, this second record adds little to our understanding. And yet, having been deposited just 8 miles -- possibly one day's march -- south of the VP record, it strongly suggests that Gore had been instructed to leave a record frequently, perhaps daily, on his southward trek. One might reasonably expect, then, several other such records were left along the coast, and might yet be recovered. The most important of these, of course, would have been at Simpson's cairn, but since by the time McClintock reached it, it had been opened, this record will probably never be recovered (the attractive part of it, from the Inuit point of view, would have been the metal cylinder, which could be re-purposed for all manner of useful things). But would certainly be worth looking for the others -- a surviving record would be far more significant than, say, a toothbrush.

It is tantalizing to think of Gore's possible achievement of the long-sought dream of linking the eastern and western surveys of the Northwest Passage -- it seems hard to imagine he would have missed his goal. We know that he returned alive to the ships, as his promotion to Commander must surely have taken place on the death of Franklin, at which time Fitzjames would have been acting Captain of the Erebus, and Gore presumably promoted to acting Commander. The idea that he would have been promoted for finding Simpson's cairn, however, has less to recommend it; such field promotions were exceedingly rare in the Navy outside of battle situations.  And, alas, since Firzjames refers to him in the VP record as the "late" Commander Gore, he must have died at some point between his return to the ships and the depositing of the 1848 record.

So was a Passage then undiscovered? Not necessarily, since as they passed along their weary and ultimately fatal retreat, Franklin's men encountered the Inuit at Washington Bay, and the presence of human remains further along the southward-tending and southern coast indicates that they must all have reached and passed the location of Simpson's cairn. In so doing, they indeed 'forged the last link with their lives.'

[With thanks to Garth Walpole for tracking down Cyriax's article on the KWI records]

Arctic Message Balloons

Inspired by a recent post on Andrés Paredes Salvador's blog on the strange tale of a balloon found in an English Garden, I've been doing a bit more research on the question of these balloons, their use, and the effect they had on the imagination of ordinary people back home in Britain.

Hydrogen and hot-air balloons had been around since the eighteenth century, and had been employed for all manner of purposes: humans went up in them, mail was first delivered using them in 1789, and inventors sought, by attaching sails and wings, to control their direction and speed. But the idea of using an unmanned balloon to carry a message seems to have originated in the Franklin search era; the ships of Austin's squadron were equipped with specially-made ones manufactured by George Shepherd (see package above), along with printing presses and strips of silk for making the messages colorful and light. The design even included a fuse which, as it burned, would release a message periodically to drift down to the ice below.

Back home in England, though, news of these balloons clearly sparked the public's imagination. For instance, among the many non-credible but nevertheless amusing letters sent to Lady Jane Franklin, there was this curious missive from February of 1850:

My lady, I have took the liberty of thus a-Dressing you with a Line through whose hands I hope will forwar to you this remarkable dream which I have often found too true . . . I saw in my dream 2 air Bloons a great distance off rising just liek the moon -- I said in my dreams to myself There's Sir. J. Franklend ...

The Gloucester balloon, "found" in a garden in October of 1851, at least had concrete form: there was a balloon, that much could not be doubted. Still, it was an odd discovery: the balloon did not show signs of having travelled thousands of miles; the "gas" in it was said to have a "foul odor" (neither hydrogen nor coal-gas has an odor, though other chemicals are added to the latter to make its detection easier); the balloon itself seemed to be of Shepherd's design, which would suggest that if Franklin's men had sent it, they must have found and re-inflated one of those sent from Austin's ships. Or, if a hoax, it must have been one retained by Shepherd, or one of the four he presented to others: one to the president of the Civil Engineers' Society, one to the Royal Society, and two to Lady Franklin. Could her Ladyship have had an interest in the hoax? It certainly seems unlikely.

What is less well-known is that Sir John Franklin's expedition came very close to being supplied with similar balloons. According to his son, Robert Baden-Powell, Professor Baden Powell of Oxford had recommended that hydrogen balloons be taken by Franklin; there is apparently a letter in which the Professor expressed his regret that this plan was not adopted.

As to the message in the balloon found in the garden -- "Erebus, 112 W, Long, 71 deg. N. Lat. September, 3, 1851. Blocked in" -- it at least makes it clear that the whole thing was a hoax, since the co-ordinates are in the midst of Victoria Land at a site with no connection to the sea, and HMS "Erebus" could not possibly have been stranded there. However, as W. Gillies Ross points out in his definitive essay on this balloon in the Polar Record, the location -- though vague -- is within the area that Dr. Rae had suggested "Erebus" and "Terror" would most likely be found, and so conceivably was chosen by someone hoping to direct searchers to this area.

Brains for Dinner

Those who have, over the years, expressed strong skepticism over the possibility of members of the Franklin expedition indulging in cannibalism take note: here is evidence, once more, of the fact that in the most desperate mad horrific of times, English people would east English people. It's a testimony to the ability of forensic science to re-construct and understand the acts of people who, on the edge of their own annihilation, reached for the "last resource" -- the bodies of their own dead. One should emphasize that, in both the case of Franklin's men and the Jamestown settlers, we have no indication that anyone actively sought to kill anyone else for the purpose of eating them. But, once dead, it's clear that human remains, and the promise of survival, however slender, that they offered, were irresistible to their comrades in the depths of despair and hunger.

Cut marks are again the key clue. In the skull of the teenage, upper-class 14-15-year-old dubbed "Jane" by those who studied the remains, the evidence is grisly. Clearly, whoever was seeking nutriment from this skull did not know how to go about doing so; there were three axe-blows on the side of the head, and three more severe ones at the back on the cranium, before the skull was actually split; this was followed by the use of a crowbar to break the shattered skull open. There are also a number of lighter cut-marks, probably produced by a knife rather than an axe, which indicate prior or further attempts to deflesh the skull; it is these cut-marks which are most similar to those seen on Franklin remains. Collectively, they tell of the attempts of a person unacquainted with butchery to butcher a fellow human being.

Brains of other animals were eaten by English folk of the Jamestown era -- indeed, their overall diet back home would have had its share of organ meats, intestines, and other animal parts far less commonly eaten by humans today. So their desperation had, in a sense, a goal perhaps less grotesque to the Jamestown settlers than to us today.

There are a number of resources and news stories online today about this finding -- Smithsonian Magazine has the best, and there's also an article in USA Today, which also shows the reconstructed head of "Jane." From the content of her teeth, she seems to have enjoyed a higher-protein diet, which makes it more likely that she was one of the upper classes and not a servant.

No one likes to imagine cannibalism.  But no one should think that, in the worst of circumstances, people of any culture or nationality are immune to it.

Arctic Visions in New Bedford

This Friday, April 26th, at the New Bedford Whaling Museum, a new exhibition of Arctic art and imagery unlike any other has its opening day. Entitled Arctic Visions: Away Then Floats the Ice-Island, it documents not only the views of Arctic scenes painted by William Bradford, but the magnificent photographs taken by the photographers George P. Critcherson and John Dunmore, who accompanied Bradford on his Arctic voyages, most importantly that aboard the "Panther" in 1869, from which the view shown above was taken. Working in challenging circumstances taking wet-plate photographs on glass and using a shipboard darkroom, these two photographers worked visual miracles. On their return, their negatives were used for a number of purposes: first, as part of a series of magic lantern lectures, narrated by Bradford and others, second, as the basis for many of Bradford's paintings and a viewbook for possible new commissions (Queen Victoria chose one that way), and finally as albumen prints, most notably used as illustrations for the magisterial, "imperial folio" volume The Arctic Regions, arguably the first, finest -- and rarest -- volumes about the Arctic ever to be illustrated with photographs.

This new exhibit offers many different ways to see all three of these uses of these pioneering photographs. An original copy of The Arctic Regions will be on display, along with touch-screen version that museum-goers can page through. Working with Boston fine-art publisher David R. Godine, the museum has republished this remarkable volume; although the format is smaller (relatively speaking!) most of the photographs are reproduced at larger than their original size. Copies of this book, for which I've written a new introduction, will be available at the Museum.

Nearby, one can view some of the original glass plate negatives, as well as albumen prints, along with several Bradford canvasses based on these same views, alongside his magisterial "Sealers Crushed by Icebergs." The lantern shows -- which eventually evolved into a series known as "The Bradford Recitals," have been be re-created with their original narration. And, to set these images in their context, there will be a rich array of polar artifacts, Inuit clothing and boat models, and even a desk -- the companion of that in the Oval Office -- made from the timbers of the Arctic search ship HMS "Resolute," and given by Queen Victoria to Henry Grinnell, sponsor of two key Arctic expeditions in the 1850's.

The concurrent exhibition "Following the Panther: Arctic Photographs of Rena Bass-Forman," showcases the work of contemporary artist Rena Bass-Forman who, inspired by Bradford's voyage, retraced Bradford's footsteps in the land of ice and stone, photographing many of these same sites as the now appear.

If you can, try to make it to the grand opening this Friday at 5 p.m. -- to mark the occasion, there will be an Arctic lantern lecture by the incomparable Terry Borton of the American Magic Lantern Theater -- and of course there will be the exhibit itself, one not to be missed!

Franklin and Scurvy

When I went up to Nunavut to participate in the ITN/NOVA program "Arctic Passage," the only other specialist the producers brought was a physician who was an expert in scurvy. And this of course made perfect sense -- after all, wasn't scurvy one of the unholy trinity (the others being lead-poisoning and cannibalism) that everyone assumed played at least some role in the demise of Franklin's men?

Well, now comes a team of osteoarchaeologists with a paper that takes a skeptical look at this assumption. The bones examined included the Greenwich skeleton (previously thought to be that of Le Vesconte) along with small numbers of bones found at Erebus Bay and Booth Point by Owen Beattie. The largest set of bones studied in modern times, those brought back from Ng-Lj-2 by Anne Keenleyside, have since been re-interred and were thus not available for direct study; here, they just examined images and data from the previous study.

I'm no specialist, but the basic gist of what they were looking for is fairly straightforward: The presence  of damage or lesions on the bone suggestive either of haemorrhage or of bone that healed imperfectly or not at all after injury. Since scurvy inhibits bone growth and repair, either one would be evidence of its presence, while the absence of such damage, or the presence of bone that had properly healed, would be evidence of the absence of the disease.

Their overall conclusion? They found  "little evidence of bony lesions consistent with evidence of the disease" and therefore suggest that "factors other than scurvy may have been the main causes of morbidity and mortality." And yet, although I have learned from friends such as William Battersby that there's a great deal to be learned by questioning the received wisdom and assumptions of past histories, I believe that this particular paper is significantly flawed, and casts very little reliable light on the question it sets out to answer.

The problems are twofold: 1) The authors rely on a variety of very uneven secondary sources as to problems with scurvy on other Arctic voyages, cherry-picking even from among these, and thus paint a deceptively optimistic picture of the success of the usual Naval regime of lemon juice; and 2) The authors do not account for the extremely small size of their sample, nor for the very limited range of sites from which the bones were recovered.

As to the first, they completely mangle the Arctic experience of Sir John Ross, mistakenly claiming that he spent four winters in the Arctic on his 1818 voyage, and treating his 1829 voyage as though it were a second one of equal duration. They are also do not mention, or are unaware, that Ross on his multi-year sojourn of 1829 received large quantities fish and fresh meat for two of those winters from his Netsilingmiut neighbors, which is almost certainly the reason for the low incidence of scurvy. They also do not look closely at multi-year expeditions, mentioning McClure and mentioning as if in passing the deaths of three of his men; casualties from other Franklin search expeditions are not mentioned at all.

Secondly, as to the sample size: they looked only at 409 bones in all. There were 129 men on the Franklin expedition, with 206 bones each -- thus 26,574 bones among them. -- so 409 bones is only 1.5% of the total. Only 105 of these bones were physically examined, less that four-tenths of one percent. All of these also come from a couple of sites on the southern coast of King William Island.

The final flaw, it seems to me, is that the writers acknowledge that it is possible that an individual could indeed be suffering from scurvy's ravages, but not show evidence of it in his bones. This makes it really impossible to extrapolate from this tiny sample anything about the prevalence of scurvy among Franklin's men. The matter surely could be further studied, but I believe that the preponderance of evidence from actual Arctic voyages of this period is that, at least in all expeditions lasting more than one winter -- with the exception of those where fresh meat was available in large quantities (Ross 1829) -- scurvy was a widespread and persisent cause of debility and death.